Latest Industry Insights

OmniTier Inc.’s new bioinformatics platform, CompStorTM Novos, takes a de novo assembly-based variant calling approach to the challenge of whole genome sequencing. We caught up with Jon Coker, Omnitier’s CTO, to discuss how this approach matches up to rival techniques, and how high-performance computing approaches like Omnitier’s hope to bring personalized medicine a step closer and boost biology in coming years.

While immunotherapy holds great promise for cancer treatment, challenges persist around limited response rate and severe immune-related adverse events. We caught up with Dr. Georg Lautscham, CEO of Protagen, to find out how the prediction of immunotherapy response can be improved for people with urothelial cancer.

Recent technology advancements have enabled the opportunity to increase the efficiency, efficacy and safety of gene and cell-based medicines for a multitude of genetic disorders. To date, a major challenge facing the field has been the ability to deliver therapeutic genes to affected cell types. In this blog, Sarah Haecker Meeks and Michael Roberts from Synpromics outline the ways in which gene medicines can be optimized to overcome this barrier.

With growing pressure on labs to reduce waste and improve sustainability, we spoke to the Sustainability Forum at Agilent to learn more about what the company are doing to help their customers achieve their sustainability goals.

There are approximately 7,000 known rare diseases, however, less than 6% of these have a treatment. It is estimated that between 25–35 million Americans live with a rare disease. The company ProQR is dedicated to developing new therapeutics for patients living with untreated rare diseases. We caught up with Daniel de Boer, Chief Executive Officer at ProQR to learn more about the company’s approach to finding new treatments for rare genetic diseases.

Having too much data sounds like a nice problem to have. But Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data’s ubiquity poses challenges as well as opportunities for geneticists. Quick, accurate and reliable workflows are top of the average geneticist’s wishlist. We caught up with OGT’s Dave Cook to discuss the challenges of NGS data, and how software can make things simpler.

No scientist is an island, and to maximize the power of data, researchers have to share their results with the wider community. Now, GenScript's launch of its MolecularCloud platform suggests sharing plasmid data may become easier than ever before.

New tools are enabling researchers to explore individual cells with unprecedented clarity, allowing RNA and protein expression levels to be simultaneously analyzed. In this blog, Brian Lilhanand, Global Platform Leader, Single Cell Multiomics, at BD, discusses how BD’s new AbSeq Assay can provide this targeted profiling and benefit immunology researchers.

Earlier this summer, the Rare Genomics Institute announced the winners of the 2018 BeHEARD (Help Empower & Accelerate Research Discoveries) Challenge. The Challenge tasks researchers or foundations working in fields of rare disease research to apply for grants, either financial or technological, to assist their research. We caught up with the Institute’s Arvin M. Gouw to discuss the awards and the battle against rare disease.

In February 2018, a team at Rady Children's Institute for Genomic Medicine broke the world record for the fastest genetic diagnosis when they delivered a rare disease diagnosis in just 19 hours 30 minutes. We caught up with John Reynders, CEO of Alexion, to discuss how the record was broken, and why diagnosing rare diseases is important in modern medicine.